No pun intended! I suppose the real question, is how do we keep our modeling skills rounded?
There is something i've noticed about myself while browsing the forums. Another young modeler who has been with the gauge for nearly as long as i have, had a thread on super detailing an engine, which surprised me. His scenic work is stellar, yet superdetailing seemed have him concerned.
I realized that i am much the opposite. My layout has average scenery, and it certainly still contains many gaps and voids where they should be a tree, or person or a fire hydrant or traffic light. Other than my never ending and never quite fully started Catenary plans, i have almost no major scenic things. in fact, i've only ever built two HO scale trees in my life!
On the other hand, my various commuter locomotives, MU cars and small freight diesels all receive some sort of detailing, even if its just a change in the paint and a better horn casting. As soon as i can identify some special thing about a locomotive or car, i try to add it if i think my skills will allow. I started out with a U34CH as a freshman in high school, and now i've got several highly detailed pieces of equipment.
I'm itching to finish various locomotive kits i have, but now that i think of it, maybe my sites have been pointed in the wrong direction. I'm sure i'll get my Arrow III EMUs done sometime, but i should really have a nice environment to run them in!
Are you trying to say you need to work on your layout? If so then I suggest getting with it and take pictures, lots of them, showing the progress / process
Lester Perry Wrote:Are you trying to say you need to work on your layout? If so then I suggest getting with it and take pictures, lots of them, showing the progress / process
I suppose i am, but i just can't help but wonder if i've let myself get caught up in a rut finding and building the weird models native to New Jersey (its the air
).
OK so build scenery that is native to New Jersey. You do know what New Jersey looks like, don't you?
And weird, it is New Jersey. It would be easy to do sand and pine trees then more sand and pine trees. Mikey could help on this topic he is close to New Jersey, just across the river. I am sure he has been there and seen the sand and pine trees. I used to haul stone there from Maryland, then sand back to Delaware. Never hauled any pine trees though.
It's just your priorities, they change just like everyone else. Once you finish one set of projects you'll start focusing on another. Just don't stay stuck in one forever
There is no requirement, other than those you impose yourself, that you have to do anything any given way in model railroading. One of our club members decided, after trying all the common approaches, that he would make models only of his favorite diesel (the Deltic or BR class 55). When last seen he was working on one in 1 1/2" scale. If you want to consider scenery only as stuff to keep the trains from falling on the floor, so be it.
gec,I been in this hobby for years and to put it quite mildly I am well rounded in some areas and know nothing or very little in other areas..IMHO that doesn't mean a thing.
Of course every modeler has his/her own areas where they shine.I never believed in "experts" since they seem to complicate the simple and overstate the obvious.
Find the areas your are best at and hone those skills..
As far as scenery..Way to many times scenery doesn't jive with Mother Nature..As a example:Ever see a layout with a large water fall that has nothing more then a small pool to catch those millions of gallons of water that comes cascading down the fall? My first thought is where is all that water going? You see Mother Nature would provide a drainage system such as a creek for that water.
Another example is having the Appalachian Mountains looking like the Rockies or vice versa.
Scenery is something that needs to be understood or it will fall short in believability.
My problem with scenery is when I get the track down, I need to see a train run to "make sure it works reliably." Then when ever I go to the layout room to work, I think "Lets just run one train" and then I'll work on scenery. Two hours later, I'm still running that "one train" and nothing else got done!
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:No pun intended! i suppose the real question, is how do we keep our modeling skills rounded?
There is something i've noticed about myself while browsing the forums. Another young modeler , had a thread on super detailing an engine, which surprised me. His scenic work is stellar, yet superdetailing seemed have him concerned.
I realized that i am much the opposite. I have almost no major scenic things. in fact, i've only ever built two HO scale trees in my life!
On the other hand, my various commuter locomotives, MU cars and small freight diesels all receive some sort of detailing, and now i've got several highly detailed pieces of equipment.
I'm itching to finish various locomotive kits i have, but now that i think of it, i should really have a nice environment to run them in!
"Another young modeler"......Time, and specific effort, round our modeling skills. Even then we don't always excel at everything. You've built two HO scale trees. OK, What's wrong with them, and how can you "fix" that with the next tree you build.
A model is a model. Whether it is a fully detailed locomotive, or a fully detailed rock, a model is a model. The trick, is to learn how to use the materials used to build that model, to learn the different techniques. You know what details a specific loco should have, you learned that. You just have to learn the details a specific tree should have, and how to get that detail made.
In model shipbuilding, the mantra is " build models of parts of ships, and assemble them into a ship model"........build models of parts of ____________, and assemble them into a layout.
Oh, and enjoy the learning curve for each of those things.
And oh yes, don't be afraid of trashing an impending failure, and starting over again. The 17' Whitehall skiff, that hangs on the stern davits of the 40' cutter I built, is the fourth one!.......the first three...."disagreed with me".
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i was their just running trains and not doing anything else. what i found that helped me on my layout to do the scenery was looking at books taking a drive going for a walk with my camera taking pics of things then modeling it nothing is better then looking at a tree on a river and seeing how the years worked it's base.
here is how i did it i
made a scenery layout plan just like a track plan but for your scenery.
made the layout a big grid marked off parts to spots i could be done in an hour or so. then i worked on that spot.
then as i got that grid done i would look at it and see if i need to add something.
where to start most work form track back into the backdrop
i work from backdrop to the tracks
the biggest things that you will need to get pics of that help alot in doing scenery
train yards get pics of everything. may sound stupid but even the oil on the tracks help. get the weeds if the have piles of old ties get pics of them also any thing that you can think of.
doing water get all the pics you can go to smaller streams that flood get pics of the water and what it dose how it pushes along the bank
doing briges same pics of everything. even that hobo that lives under it.
we are modeling after real trains and the more we pull from the real into our models the better they look
alot of the older guys here remember the old pics i posted of my layout with the yard and then the one of the bridge
that is a shame i don't have them any more not even the layout. and this new layout if no photo wife made me promise due to having keegens pass
i am going to start a shelf switching layout soon to due atlot of kit bashing and trying some new things out on.
doing scenery is not a big deal if you use the way i did all my layouts you will see the out come as the days go bye.
and you can still run your loco as you do this. just put the music on get a drink start up your power unit and be for you know your done with that spot and ready to move on.
I suppose. I'm not even sure i really came up with a real good scenery plan. Since i planned to stay more urban, i had all the structures planned, and their sidewalks, but i hadn't considered things like traffic lights and street lights, tree locations. I suppose every once in a while, one has to stop and do something different!
I don't doubt my ability to make a tree, or to plant a few extra shrubs or anything of that nature. the worst that can be said is that i don't always have a good sense of how it should all go together (i might randomly start planting things with no rhyme or reason). As Brakie said, sometimes there is only a pool at the bottom of a waterfall, and it doesn't sync (Though i HAVE seen a waterfall like that, with loose rocks in the bottom. water fell underground and came out somewhere else).
I just never got around to it, lol. While its good to focus on what you're good at, i suppose i aim for an eclectic approach in everything i do, and i've been neglecting that part of my layout.
Sumpter250 Wrote:And oh yes, don't be afraid of trashing an impending failure, and starting over again. The 17' Whitehall skiff, that hangs on the stern davits of the 40' cutter I built, is the fourth one!.......the first three...."disagreed with me". [ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
LOL! I like the way you "resolve" your models. Yeah, i have a wooden model of the Cutty Stark that i'll probably never build because that terrifies me. I'm not used to things not plastic or metal, lol. I've only built one wood caboose kit. i'll have to ask about that one sometime, but thats for another thread!
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:I suppose. I'm not even sure i really came up with a real good scenery plan. Since i planned to stay more urban, i had all the structures planned, and their sidewalks, but i hadn't considered things like traffic lights and street lights, tree locations. I suppose every once in a while, one has to stop and do something different!
If you want inspiration for urban scenes, search "spitfire" here, and on the "old gauge". She does some amazing urban scenery. Also, check out "jglfan",here, he also has done some really neat urban scenes, on his layout.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the skiff is 3" long, and built plank on frame, and each "failure" was fairly well along in construction when I decided it wasn't going to be good enough. For that particular project, "good enough" wasn't good enough.
It appears that we maintain our modeling skills by...modeling.
hock:
Wow...who knew?
MountainMan Wrote:It appears that we maintain our modeling skills by...modeling. hock:
Wow...who knew?
Ouch! I hurt myself thinking about that one.
Would that be kinda like a
EUREKA! moment?
